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		<title>A strange day at work and a boring day at home &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/12-December/03.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>A strange day at work and a boring day at home</h1>
			<p>Day 00637: <time>Saturday, 2016 December 03</time></p>
		</header>
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/12/03.jpg" alt="Cactus fruit" class="framed-centred-image" width="809" height="480"/>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		Today was an odd day at work.
		As I had a closing shift today, I ran the drive through.
		First, a former coworker (who quit working here before I did) stopped by for food.
		It was nice to see them, but then they asked me how the new breast implants of one of the shift leaders look.
		I&apos;m honestly not sure if I&apos;ve seen them since their surgery.
		As an asexual, I don&apos;t tend to notice <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic">secondary sex characteristics</a>, or at least not changes in them.
		I mean, I can tell the difference between members of each sex, but I&apos;m not going to notice changes very quickly unless they&apos;re on the face or the rest of the head.
	</p>
	<p>
		Next, as I was informing the shift leader at the ovens&apos; landing about which pizzas I took from the warmer so that they could replace it if need be, the shift leader tried to get me to use wacky terminology.
		One of the pizzas that I sold was a ham and pineapple pizza.
		Most of our customers call this a Hawaiian pizza.
		The whole United States calls this a Hawaiian pizza.
		As far as I know, the <strong>*world*</strong> calls this a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Hawaiian_pizza">Hawaiian pizza</a>.
		(This is dispute the fact that this apparently is a Canadian pizza style, not one that&apos;s actually from Hawaii, but that&apos;s beyond the scope of this journal entry.) However, at my workplace, the corporation that we are a franchise of puts strange labels on a bunch of things; they&apos;ve named this pizza a &quot;Hula Hawaiian&quot;.
		I&apos;d link to the menu item online, but it&apos;s behind a CloudFlare <abbr title="Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart">CAPTCHA</abbr> wall, and if you&apos;re a regular reader, you know that I try to avoid linking to those.
		In any case, at our restaurant, our employees have shortened the name and have taken to calling these pizzas &quot;hulas&quot;.
		This shift leader wants me to call them that too for some reason, but there&apos;s no valid reason for me to do so.
		These are Hawaiian pizzas and should be called that.
		Admittedly, out of laziness, I often call them &quot;Hawaiians&quot; instead of &quot;Hawaiian pizzas&quot;, but given the context, it seems like a reasonable shorthand.
		It&apos;s not a very formal environment, and given that Hawaiian pizzas are one of the main pizzas that we sell, everyone knows what I&apos;m talking about.
		Likewise, I don&apos;t argue when people call them &quot;hulas&quot;.
		However, I certainly don&apos;t call them that myself.
		If the shift leader wanted me to call them &quot;Hula Hawaiians&quot;, while I&apos;d still disagree, at least it would make sense.
		It would be an attempt to build emphasis on our brand.
		However, there is zero justification in asking me to call them &quot;hulas&quot;.
		As I despise the fact that we aren&apos;t using standard terminology, I&apos;m going to pretend that I didn&apos;t hear the shift leader.
		In truth, there&apos;s probably a twenty-five percent chance that I misheard, as it&apos;s very difficult to make out what people in the room say while I&apos;m wearing the drive-through headset.
		If they tell me again though, I&apos;m not sure how to react.
		Obviously, I cannot disobey a direct order.
		However, I also obviously cannot call these things what they&apos;re not.
		To call them &quot;hulas&quot; is to encourage others to do the same.
		If I cannot both obey my orders and call them what they are really called, I&apos;m going to have to choose one.
	</p>
	<p>
		As the night was ending, a customer came through the drive-through looking for one of our specialty pizzas, which we can&apos;t keep ready after 20:00.
		We don&apos;t have enough customers come through after that, so if we keep the specialty pizzas ready, they&apos;ll go bad before we sell them and we&apos;ll have to throw them out.
		We still keep cheese pizzas and pepperoni pizzas ready until we close, and we&apos;re more than happy to make specialty pizzas on demand, but customers have to wait ten to fifteen minutes while we prepare and cook them.
		I explained the situation to the customer, but they were angry that we didn&apos;t have the specialty pizza that they wanted ready.
		They said that because we were making them wait, they were going to a competing pizza joint instead.
		I told the head manager about it, just making conversation because we were in the same room, and they said that that particular pizza joint chain that they went to instead would make them wait for half an hour, regardless of what they ordered.
		The customer wasted even more of their time out of spite.
		Not only would they have a shorted wait time with us, they were already here.
		In addition to the thirty-minute wait for their order to be completed at the other chain, they also had to spend time <strong>*getting*</strong> to the other chain.
		Some people are morons.
	</p>
	<p>
		As I was finishing up my work and headed out, the other non-manager closer told me about a tree elsewhere in the city.
		Supposedly, the sidewalk passes right through this tree&apos;s trunk.
		I would like to see this tree and add its photograph to my journal, but they didn&apos;t know exactly where it is; they haven&apos;t seen it in person.
		Supposedly, the shift leader with the pizza name issues was the one to see it though, so next time that I see them, I need to remember to ask them about it.
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="include.d">
	<h2><a href="https://git.volatile.ch./y.st./include.d/releases">include.d</a></h2>
	<p>
		It turns out that I was wrong yesterday.
		<abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr> does have the option to deal with multi-byte characters, it just can&apos;t deal with them using the simple functions.
		Regular expression functions must be used instead.
		Still, this will take a lot of the effort out, as I won&apos;t need to build my own solution and especially won&apos;t need to check for invalid strings.
		Either <abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr> will throw an error of some sort when invalid strings are used or <abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr> will allow the string to work in some way.
		In either case, it&apos;s no longer my problem.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve also come to a realization about checking for the existence of variables in <abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr>.
		Previously, I thought that it was impossible.
		Specifically, the <code>isset</code> language construct returns <code>false</code> if the variable&apos;s value is set to <code>null</code> and the <code>empty</code> language construct returns <code>true</code> for both <code>null</code> and undeclared variables (as well as for several other cases).
		So how does one check to see if a variable is set, considering that being set to <code>null</code> is a valid case? The trick is to make use of the <a href="https://secure.php.net./manual/en/reserved.variables.globals.php"><code>$GLOBALS</code></a> variable and the <a href="https://secure.php.net./array_key_exists"><code>\array_key_exists()</code></a> function.
		It&apos;s worth noting that this will only work on variables that are in the global scope, but it still comes a lot closer to being able to check for the existence of variables than other solutions provide so far.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="university">
	<h2>University life</h2>
	<p>
		I finished reading the assigned chapter for the week, which was almost painfully boring.
		I swear, this really isn&apos;t the right course for me.
		I really hope that I&apos;m actually able to choose fitting courses next term.
	</p>
</section>
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			If for some reason you would prefer to modify and/or distribute this document under other free copyleft terms, please ask me via email.
			My address is in the source comments near the top of this document.
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